1. Field of Invention
This invention is directed to systems, methods and graphical user interfaces that enable document optimized printing of different types of image objects.
2. Background of the Invention
As color printers, including color ink jet printers, color laser printers and digital color copiers and the like, have become more sophisticated, users of such color printers have required more sophisticated rendering of the various portions of mixed content documents. Such mixed content documents can include text portions, graphics portions and photograph portions.
Prior to the advent of high quality computer generated documents, documents, such as newspapers, newsletter, magazines and the like, were formed by graphic artists composing the documents by hand. Thus, in such hand-composed documents, each different type of object within the documents, such as text, photographs, constant color areas or graphs such as pie charts, and sampled or continuously changing images such as sweeps, was optimally formed independently of any other type of object.
Because these page images were composed by hand, each type of object was inherently treated independently of the other objects. Thus, for example, the optimal halftoned screen design for photographs, which differs from the optimal halftone screen designs for constant color areas and text, could be selected and the selected screen arranged to an optimal angle.
Initially, color printers, such as color ink jet printers, rendered each document with a unitary set of rendering techniques. Thus, a single halftone screen was applied to each of the different types of image areas in a page, including the text areas, the photographic areas, the sampled image areas and the constant color areas, regardless of whether that halftone screen was appropriate for that image area. This was true for any other rendering parameter, such as the color settings, the gamut settings, the type of compression used, and the like.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,687,303 to Rumph et al., incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, discloses systems and methods for treating each object of an electronic document independently of the other objects. Thus, the appropriate rendering parameter options could be selected for each different type of object and applied to each different type of object independently of the parameters selected for the other types of objects. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,579,446 to Naik et al. and 5,704,021 to Smith et al. disclose various graphical user interfaces that allow different color control options and different halftoning techniques to be independently applied to text objects, graphics objects and photo objects. In particular, in the 446 and 021 specification, the user has the option of manually selecting the rendering options or allowing the system to apply default rendering options to each different type of object.
However, the systems and graphical user interfaces disclosed in the 446 and 021 patents set the rendering parameter options independently of a particular document. Similarly, the systems and methods disclosed in the 303 patent render each object using the selected set of rendering parameter options for that object""s type, as modified by any provided rendering tags or hints. All of the 303, 446 and 021 patents render each object independently. For documents having many independent objects, this can require significant computational resources and/or a long time to complete.
However, many documents have a predominant document type. That is, in many documents, a predominant number of the independent objects have the same object type, or more generally, the same content type. For example, many documents have a large number of independent text objects, with a relatively small number of graphics type objects and/or photo type objects appearing in the document. Thus, determining the object type of each of the independent objects and applying different rendering techniques based on each object""s determined object type is unnecessarily resource and time consuming. Rather, for such documents, it is often sufficient to merely identify a document type for that document, with a predetermined set of rendering techniques to be applied to all of the objects within that document based on the determined document type. In other situations, such as printing an HTML document from an accessed website, a user may be interested in one type of object, such as the text objects, the bitmap objects, the photograph objects or the graphics objects, to the exclusion of the other types of objects. For example, the user may be interested in the text of an article on a newspaper website and thus does not care whether the non-text objects within that web page are optimally rendered. In these examples, optimally rendering each of the various independent objects within the document may unnecessarily consume valuable computational and/or time resources in order to print at an optimized quality level objects whose quality the user is indifferent to.
Accordingly, this invention provides systems, methods and graphical user interfaces for defining a set of rendering parameter options for rendering the independent objects of a document based on an identified document type, irrespective of the particular content type or object type of each of the objects making up that document.
This invention separately provides systems, methods and graphical user interfaces that automatically determine a predominant object type of a document and that apply a set of rendering parameter options to all of the objects of that document based on the determined predominant object type.
This invention separately provides systems, methods and graphical user interfaces that permit a user to define a set of document optimized rendering parameter options for rendering a document.
This invention separately provides systems, methods and a graphical user interface that apply two or more sets of rendering parameter options to different types of objects of a documents, based on a document type selected or determined for that document.
These and other features and advantages of this invention are described in or are apparent from the following detailed description of various exemplary embodiments of the systems and methods according to this invention.